I actually started my own blog a couple of weeks ago (http://ahappymichaela.blogspot.co.uk/)One of my first posts was a little bit of an intorduction to me and my journey. I thought it might be helpful to post on here as well!
To start my journey, I want to talk about how I've reached this place in my life. A place where I'm not healthy and not happy about it.
The way I feel about my body goes as far back as I can remember. For my entire life, I have struggled with my weight. As early as primary school, I remember looking around at the other kids and thinking 'why are they smaller than me?'. I've always been slightly over weight and somewhere along the line 'slightly overweight' became severely overweight.
As my feelings of insecurity have grown, so has my body. Over the last 7 years, I've tried a number of different diets and work-out regimes, always looking for a quick fix. Sometimes they worked, most of the time they didn't. As most quick fixes go, eventually I get bored and end up back where I started, often gaining more weight than what I began with.
After going through some big changes after high school, I lost a considerable amount of weight. I was living with my dad, eating well and exercising regularly. Physically, I was in a good place and for the first time, I felt confident in my body. However, on the inside I was screaming for help. I was having regular panic attacks, dealing with anxiety and trying to figure out depression. At the start of 2014, I hit a wall.
It was in 2014 - around two years after high school - that my depression hit its lowest low. I began to push away the things that made me happy, and became comfortable with being sad. It controlled my life, and in doing so controlled the way I looked at myself. I made choices that led me down an un-healthy path and in doing so, have gotten to the highest weight I've ever been.
If you know anything about being overweight, you know that its an incredibly unhealthy cycle. It's not as simple as eating too much, or exercising too little. The unhealthy behavior stems from issues that go deeper than what you can control. As I always have, I used food to help me deal with my emotions. Which leads me to believe that the changes I need to make have more to do with my mental health than my physical. Of course, changes to my diet and life style will be just as important, but my main focus on this journey is to reach a place of content in my mind.
I don't want to feel sad anymore. I want to look at myself in the mirror and be proud of what I see. I want to make positive changes that will lead me down a path to a happier life.
This is the start of my journey to a healthier, happier me.
Michaela x